It’s 6.30pm on a hot evening at Retiro Mitre station in Buenos Aires. There’s a smell of yerba mate tea in the air. A 50-metre queue of families and solo travellers has formed beneath the iron and glass vault, most of them off on holiday. Some have brought their own pillows, as they face a long journey. Before them are a dozen empty platforms and just one, sky-blue, train. There are only two services a week between Argentina’s two largest cities, Buenos Aires and Córdoba, so missing this train means a three-day wait. The 750km journey takes 13 hours, according to the official timetable.

Then comes an announcement, thanking passengers for choosing the train, and saying that around midnight the service will terminate at San Nicolás de los Arroyos, 220km northwest of Buenos Aires. The next 70km will be by bus, then another train to their destination, ‘if everything goes according to plan’. Heavy rains have made some sections impassable.

Antonio Giménez is off to visit his family. ‘It took 13 hours 15 years ago. This is just ridiculous... I suppose it’s for our safety.’ Accidents are frequent on Argentina’s railways. In Buenos Aires province alone, the National Transport Regulation Commission (CNRT) recorded over 500 in 2015 directly due to the condition of the network: 67 derailments (50 more than in 2005), 118 collisions with vehicles, and dozens of diesel locomotive fires. This situation is replicated nationwide.

At 7.07pm the train leaves. It’s a far cry from the ‘abolition of space by time’ promised by British engineers who built these main lines in the 19th century. Tonight, travelling at a top speed of 40km/h, passengers have the opposite sensation: the train seems to suspend time and extend the endless empty space of the Pampas.

The pendulum between privatisation and nationalisation has set the pace on this network. When the state set it up in 1857, the first line of the Ferrocarril Oeste (FCO) was supposed to end the isolation of provinces (...)